Helen Frankenthaler

Helen Frankenthaler was born in Manhattan in 1928, and was a major figure in American abstract painting. She was included in Clement Greenberg's landmark 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction, which launched a newer generation of abstract painters. Frankenthaler emerged as one of the major proponents of Colour Field painting, which was largely characterized by large fields of flat, solid colour spread across the canvas, creating a flat picture plane. She was married to the Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell, from 1958-1971, and was heavily influenced by the formalist / New York School discourse she was immersed in during her schooling at Bennington College, Vermont, as well as her New York artistic circles of the 1950s, including Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Hans Hoffmann, under whom she studied. Her work can be found in major public collections, including LACMA, Los Angeles; Tate Gallery, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.